Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD, known in the prototype phase as Project Blackbox) is a portable data center built into a standard 20-foot

intermodal container An intermodal container, often called a shipping container, or a freight container, (or simply "container") is a large metal crate designed and built for intermodal freight transport, meaning these containers can be used across different Mode ...

(shipping container), manufactured and marketed by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

(acquired in 2010 by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

). A data center of up to 280 servers could be rapidly deployed using existing standardized transport methods to locations that might not be suitable for a building or other structure, and connecting it to the required

infrastructure Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and pri ...

(including an external chiller and power source). Sun stated that the system could be made operational for 1% of the cost of building a traditional data center.

History

The goal, as conceived by Greg Papadopoulos and Dave Douglas from Sun Labs and Danny Hillis from Applied Minds, was to design the largest possible " thumb drive" that could still be easily transported worldwide by truck, rail, or air. Since intermodal container transportation infrastructure exists in nearly every country, their answer was a 20-foot standard shipping container, modified to support eight 40RU compute racks populated with servers, storage, and other equipment. The initial target markets included secure portable data centers, and disaster relief to allow Internet access for email and insurance forms. The prototype build was hosted at the Applied Minds facility, managed by Adam Yates from Applied Minds and Russ Rinfret from Sun. The prototype was first announced as "Project Blackbox" in October 2006; a Project Blackbox with 1088 AMD Opteron processors ranked #412 on the June 2007

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list. The product was officially announced in January 2008.

Team

Marketing

* Darlene Yaplee, senior director * Michael Bohlig * Cheryl Martin * Bob Schiolmueller, technical marketing * Joe Carvalho, technical marketing

Engineering

* Jud Cooley, senior director for the project * Chuck Perry, software and environmental systems design * Russ Rinfret, mechanical engineering manager * Lee Follmer * Tim Jolly * Alex Barandian * Chris Wooley * Chris Spect * Carl Meske * Jeff Galloway, supply and vendor management

Customers

On 14 July 2007, the

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, Menlo Park, Ca ...

deployed a Sun MD containing 252 Sun Fire X2200 compute nodes as a compute farm. In March 2009, the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

migrated its digital archive into a Sun MD, hosted at Sun's Santa Clara headquarters campus, a realization of a paper written by Archive employees in late 2003 proposing "an outdoor petabyte JBOD

NAS Nas (born 1973) is the stage name of American rapper Nasir Jones. Nas, NaS, or NAS may also refer to: Aviation * Nasair, a low-cost airline carrier and subsidiary based in Eritrea * National Air Services, an airline in Saudi Arabia ** Nas Air (S ...

box" of sufficient capacity to store the then-current Archive in a 40' shipping container. Other customers included Radboud University.

References

External links

Sun Modular Datacenter S20 Product Library Documentation

Project Blackbox Blog
* {{Intermodal containers Sun Microsystems hardware Intermodal containers Data centers Modular datacenter Computer-related introductions in 2008